The U.S. Supreme Court is about to face a question of global importance: Whether to accept Donald Trump’s claim that the United States’ trade deficit constitutes an “emergency” across nearly every industry. That claim, believe it or not, is the justification for Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs—sweeping levies imposed on almost every U.S. trading partner, justified under a law that permits presidents to act only in the face of an “unusual and extraordinary” threat.
An appeals court has already rejected Trump’s claim, calling most of the tariffs illegal. But the final decision will rest with a Supreme Court that has in recent years gone further than any in modern memory in authorizing an authoritarian presidency. Previously, it granted Trump almost unlimited personal immunity. Now the question is whether it will bless his far more audacious fiction—that a trade imbalance justifies the executive seizure of Congress’ core power to set tariffs.
That would amount to a declaration that there are no limits left—that a president can invent an emergency in order to rule by decree, on anything. We saw the cost of this attitude at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s meeting last weekend, in which India, livid at Trump’s 50 percent tariffs, was demonstrative in cozying up to China and Russia.
What is at stake is not just trade policy but the very principle that law constrains power. And the case does not stand alone. It exemplifies Trump’s style of governance: firing officials who tell the truth, shaking down companies, seizing control of local police, censoring museums, and gutting or undermining federal agencies, including the Federal Reserve.
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Republicans used to stand for restraint and order, devoted to the sanctity of markets and the stability of institutions. Barry Goldwater thundered against centralized power, Ronald Reagan lionized hands-off government and liberty, and even Richard Nixon respected certain limits. The old GOP believed in rules and institutions and in America as a beacon for lofty values in the world.
Today, officials get fired for telling the truth. This summer it was Erika McEntarfer, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, dismissed after a jobs report showed the economy only added 73,000 new positions. Then Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was removed for reporting that strikes on Iran had set back Tehran’s nuclear program by only months, not “completely obliterated” as Trump insisted.
No president before has been so brazen in punishing honesty. Once professionals know their survival depends on pleasing the leader rather than serving the country, things fall apart.
The abandonment of principle extends across Trump’s economic policies. Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, and countless others built careers demonizing state interference as “socialism.” Yet now we have Trump shaking down the CEO of Intel to fork over ten percent of his company to the government by retroactively converting grants promised under the CHIPS Act into equity. A Republican president nationalizing a company by fiat would once have been unthinkable—yet today’s mutated version of the Republican Party cheers it on.
Now comes the assault on the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank. Independence of monetary policy has long been considered sacrosanct—the bedrock of global confidence in the dollar.
Trump doesn’t care. He began by threatening to fire Chairman Jerome Powell last month. More recently he sent walking papers to one of the governors, Lisa Cook. By law, governors serve 14-year terms and can only be removed for cause, presumably related to performance and actions in office. Experts consider Trump’s the flimsiest of pretexts: She once declared two primary residences in a single calendar year.
Cook plans to resist, and a legal battle looms—which will doubtless end up with the Supreme Court that Trump considers his rubber stamp. If those lemmings play along, the precedent will be devastating. Already markets are having their say: Long-dated Treasuries and stocks slipped, the dollar softened, and gold spiked—an unmistakable signal that investors now fear the Fed itself is being dragged into Trump’s political circus.
Investors will equate the United States to Turkey or Argentina, where leaders bully central banks and currencies collapse. Every American household would pay for it with higher prices, weaker savings, and diminished global standing.
Across every domain, the Trump presidency has dismantled principles Republicans once revered. And that, of course, included free trade. It also included valuing alliances of the sort we were building with India, which has been pushed by Trump’s tariffs into the arms of China and Russia.
The United States has survived much in its history, but has never been subjected to such a sustained internal assault. It’s epically bad government, and the real derangement lies not with the complainers but in those who excuse it, normalize it, and cheer it on.
Dan Perry is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor (also leading coverage from Iran) and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press, the former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem, and the author of two books. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
